Govt school jobs elude thousands of chosen teachers

- Around 65000 candidates who cleared TET last year are yet to receive appointment letters

A.S.R.P. MUKESH

Governor Syed Ahmed, along with other officials, releases TET results at JAC auditorium in May 2013

Prajesh Choubey is not sure whether he will ever get a government job. The 32-year-old, who is currently working as a temporary teacher (science) at DAV School, Bokaro, has cleared both state-conducted Teachers Eligibility Test (TET) and Common Teachers Eligibility Test (CTET). But that’s it. He is yet to get a call for the next rounds of the selection process

n Despite sailing through TET, Rajesh Kumar (30) of Ranchi has to be content with working at a spoken English institute. He is frustrated that first the government took years to hold the exam. Now, the wait for the recruitment process to start full-fledged seems to be a never-ending one

Ranchi, April 27: Choubey and Kumar are among the 65,439 hapless candidates, who despite clearing TET and being eligible to teach at primary and upper primary classes are either jobless or working temporarily at private schools and institutes while 40,000-odd government cradles continue to battle manpower crunch.

For the first time since Jharkhand was created, the state HRD department, after a string of controversies and twin cancellations, finally managed to conduct the teacher recruitment test through Jharkhand Academic Council (JAC) last year.

Jharkhand Academic Council (JAC), to which the job was outsourced in 2012, held the test in April last year and the results were published in May.

Since then, the state government has been sitting on the list of chosen candidates, doing little to absorb them in schools.

Roughly, close to 10,000 teachers were to be recruited in the first phase based on their grades and the HRD department’s requirement.

During earlier interactions with The Telegraph, JAC chairman Anand Bhushan had made it clear that once the results of TET were published, the recruitment ball was at the government’s (HRD) court. It is for the government to decide when and how to place the selected candidates, he had added.

However, the HRD bosses appeared to be clueless about the entire recruitment process.

While incumbent HRD secretary K. Vidyasagar didn’t take calls, joint secretary Kameshwar Prasad said he wasn’t aware of any thing.

“It (hiring process) is done at the level of education directorate. Hence, we don’t have any idea,” he said.

Director of primary education Jitwahan Oraon was incommunicado, while Ranchi superintendent of education Jayant Mishra said initially, about 995 teachers were to be recruited for the district — 596 at the primary level and the rest in Urdu section.

“As far as I know, last year applications were invited from candidates who have cleared TET. I don’t remember the exact number of applications received, but the data was fed and rosters were in the process of getting prepared. So, any movement of file in this regard can happen only after the elections,” Mishra added.